This invention has to do with load dividers of a novel type which will be referred to as column load dividers and which are designed especially to stabilize certain types of lading in railway freight cars.
That specialized lading is well illustrated by the shipment of automobile parts from the factory to the assembly plant. Such parts are loaded into rigid racks or baskets which are typically of uniform external size and are individually strong and rigid. Such baskets can be stacked from floor to roof and are typically placed crosswise in the car, forming two rows of stacks which fill the width of the car with only enough clearance for convenient handling by a forklift truck. Two equal rows of such stacks then form a rectangular lading configuration which extends from the car end wall inward toward the center of the car a distance which may vary with the number of baskets in the load.
It has been common practice to anchor such a lading configuration in the car by means of a conventional load dividing bulkhead which extends continuously across the exposed face of the lading and is locked at its four corners to rails mounted in the car. However, especially in the very large high cube cars commonly used in automobile parts service, the correspondingly large size and necessarily strong construction of such load dividing bulkheads tends to make them unreasonably heavy, inconvenient to handle and potentially dangerous.
It has recently been appreciated that, if the exposed face of such a lading configuration were restrained only close to the vertical car side walls, the central portion of the face would also be effectively stabilized, due to the rigidity of the bastkets and their close fit within the width of the car. It has therefore been suggested that the gate structure for restraining each lading configuration have the form of two gates each of which extends inward from one of the side walls transversely of the car, but only for the minimum distance consistent with making the gate sufficiently strong and providing sufficient area of contact with the lading to avoid excessive local stresses upon it. Such a gate comprises essentially a vertical column, with means for supporting it and moving it along the car side wall and for locking it at a selected position with its working face opposing the face of the lading. With a pair of such gates opposing the lading in each end of the car, though only the two opposite edge portions of each lading face are directly anchored, the entire lading is effectively restrained.